The future is nearer than you think, meet PaperPhone & Snaplet

Let’s see, your smartphone can make phone calls, play music, store contacts, store books etc. But how thin is your smartphone, can you bend it? Meet PaperPhone which can do all the stuffs that your smartphone can, plus as its name suggests it’s as thin as a paper and it bends to your will – in fact, bending is the way to interact with this PaperPhone.

The creator, Roel Vertegaal says, “This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years.” The PaperPhone has a 9.5 cm diagonal thin film flexible E Ink display, it’s flexible, it’s portable and you don’t have to worry about dropping it. So, his prediction can indeed come true.

The whole idea of using a thin film of flexible E Ink display and resistive bend sensors under it has also been put in a wristband computer, Snaplet. Snaplet sense its shape and works accordingly. When it’s bent over your wrist, its display becomes a touch screen and when it’s flat you can bend it to interact with it just like PaperPhone or you can write on it with a pen.

"The paperless office is here. Everything can be stored digitally and you can place these computers on top of each other just like a stack of paper, or throw them around the desk" says Dr. Vertegaal.

These paper computers consume power only when you interact with it. We don’t know what else these paper computers can do but we guess, Vertegaal is saving all the good stuffs for May 10 as it will be demonstrated at the Association of Computing Machinery’s CHI 2011 (Computer Human Interaction) conference in Vancouver — the premier international conference of Human-Computer Interaction.